Face­book fol­lows the news just like you do. And it has been pay­ing at­ten­tion to the weird and wor­ry­ing new trend that em­ploy­ers have asked pro­spect­ive em­ploy­ees for their Face­book pass­words dur­ing the hir­ing pro­cess.

“We don’t think em­ploy­ers should be ask­ing pro­spect­ive em­ploy­ees to provide their pass­words, be­cause we don’t think it’s right the thing to do,” Erin Egan, Face­book’s chief pri­vacy of­ficer, ex­plains. “But it also may cause prob­lems for the em­ploy­ers that they are not an­ti­cip­at­ing. For ex­ample, if an em­ploy­er sees on Face­book that someone is a mem­ber of a pro­tec­ted group (e.g. over a cer­tain age) that em­ploy­er may open them­selves up to claims of dis­crim­in­a­tion if they don’t hire that per­son.”

But! It’s not just that shar­ing or so­li­cit­ing pass­words is now a vi­ol­a­tion of Face­book’s terms of ser­vice. “We’ll take ac­tion to pro­tect the pri­vacy and se­cur­ity of our users,” Egan notes, “wheth­er by en­ga­ging poli­cy­makers or, where ap­pro­pri­ate, by ini­ti­at­ing leg­al ac­tion, in­clud­ing by shut­ting down ap­plic­a­tions that ab­use their priv­ileges.”

In oth­er words, Face­book will prob­ably sue parties who ask for its users’ pass­words.

The lan­guage also leaves open the pos­sib­il­ity of su­ing users who vol­un­tar­ily share their pass­words with oth­ers: “You will not,” its says, “share your pass­word, (or in the case of de­velopers, your secret key), let any­one else ac­cess your ac­count, or do any­thing else that might jeop­ard­ize the se­cur­ity of your ac­count.” While, of course, it’s hard to ima­gine any scen­ario in which Face­book would ac­tu­ally be­ne­fit from su­ing one of its users for a pass­word-share, the lan­guage sug­gests at least that pos­sib­il­ity.

Which, whoa—I can’t think of any­thing that comes close to a pre­ced­ent for this in terms of Face­book’s re­la­tion­ship with its users: su­ing people on users’ be­half! (And maybe even su­ing users on users’ be­half!)

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Ex­cept, of course, it wouldn’t be just on users’ be­half; the no­tion­al suits would be as much about pro­tect­ing Face­book as about pro­tect­ing its le­gions of ac­count-hold­ers. “If you are a Face­book user,” Egan notes, “you should nev­er have to share your pass­word, let any­one ac­cess your ac­count, or do any­thing that might jeop­ard­ize the se­cur­ity of your ac­count or vi­ol­ate the pri­vacy of your friends.” The key phrase be­ing, ac­tu­ally, vi­ol­ate the pri­vacy of your friends. The policy up­date is a strik­ing ad­mis­sion of the value of the con­nec­tions that live and grow on Face­book’s plat­form: A vi­ol­a­tion of one user’s pri­vacy through pass­word ac­cess is, im­pli­citly, the vi­ol­a­tion of the pri­vacy of all of that user’s friends and fam­ily and cowork­ers and former cowork­ers and ran­dom ac­quaint­ances and ele­ment­ary-school class­mates and bowl­ing-league team­mates and former flames.

And, sure: It’s easy to see Fri­day’s an­nounce­ment simply as a con­veni­ent PR play on the part of a net­work that is bet­ter known for vi­ol­a­tions, rather than de­fenses, of its users’ pri­vacy. And that likely has at least something to do with the policy change. It’s more in­ter­est­ing, though, to see the up­date as a re­mind­er of the core and cru­cial role of the net­work as­pect of Face­book’s so­cial net­work. On Face­book, pri­vacy isn’t per­son­al, and it isn’t private. It is col­lect­ive. It is shared. And that means that the vi­ol­a­tion of pri­vacy is shared as well.

"The Trump administration is putting pressure on Senate Republicans to crack down on Democratic efforts to delay its agenda, fueling talk about the need for rules reform among Republicans on Capitol Hill. Republicans are in discussions with Democrats about bipartisan changes to Senate rules to speed up consideration of President Trump’s judicial and executive branch nominees, but if that effort flounders — as similar ones have in the past — they’re not ruling out unilateral action."

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